Friday, June 20, 2014

The War that Never Ended

The
War that Never Ended

Most people are taught that Americans slowly came out of their
isolationism in the 1930s and ended up joining the fight in the second World
War, eventually ending years of blood and violence with an ultimate act of
attack. Ask any American and he or she will quickly tell you that our country
is at a fair level of peace and that the World Wars ended, guiding us into not
only a baby boom, but also a higher level of prosperity. In many ways, our
entire population is in denial as to the effects and long term influence of
going to war. We are, summarily, still stuck in a post-war period without
healing in sight.

The elite, the scientists, the followers of Hitler’s
regime in that time, instead of surrendering in Germany, appear to have simply
crawled over to our country and slowly influenced the values and behaviors of
our population to this day. A popular point of contention in this topic is
Margaret Sanger’s American Birth Control League, which she founded in 1921. This league included prominent members of euthanasia and eugenics groups, and
was focused on passing laws in America to restrict the sexual freedoms of races
or individuals deemed unfit to have children. The American Birth Control League
was later changed to the name we now recognize today, Planned
Parenthood. In 1938, The Montreal Gazette printed a list of
prominent scientists and researchers of the time who were expanding the league
to include euthanasia:

Mrs.
F. Robertson Jones, honorary president of the American Birth Control League.
Dr. Clarence Cook Little, managing director of the American Society for the
Control of Cancer. Dr. George H. Parker, professor of zoology in Harvard
University (Montreal Gazette, 19).

The
cold, clinical science of the time rolled right into the industrial
mindset, the two becoming a force against nature and gripping every part of our
culture. We met it with open arms, indeed, it was an integral part of our fighting,
unleashing plane upon plane into battle and putting every citizen to work. But,
once the last bomb had dropped and the last soldiers lie prone on the
ground in surrender, our assembly-line detachment towards other human beings
had only just begun. With the Baby Boom spreading across the country, doctors
and hospitals hurriedly turned the medical field into a cold and efficient
industry. Women rushed out of their homes to work during the war and now men
rushed in to an area that up to this time in history was almost exclusively
reserved for females. Judith Rooks, in her book, Midwifery and Childbirth in America, points out the change:

Early
in this century American obstetrics became committed to a path that has led to
a highly medicalized approach to the care of women during pregnancy…robbing
many women and their loved ones of a powerful, potentially life-enhancing
experience. Highly medicalized pregnancy care is based on a view of pregnancy that
focuses on its potential for pathology (Rooks 1).

Just
as factories had taken raw materials and pieced together planes and ammo for
the war in a speedy, efficient manner, doctors were now lining women up and
delivering babies as if creating products on a tight deadline. And it took some
marketing to persuade women to abandon their private homebirths and move into
the assembly lines at the hospitals.

First,
midwives and doulas needed to be discredited and scorned to restrict women’s
choices and have women turn to the hospitals more readily. This was easy enough to
do with carefully placed smear campaigns, utilizing the immigration politics and
racism of that time. Keith, Reynolds and Brennan explored the use of
photography to manipulate feelings about midwifery and physicians in their
article, In Defense of Lay Midwifery: The
Visual Culture of Midwife Education.The authors analyze one such photo,
pointing out that the midwives were positioned in a particular way around state
officials to portray a certain hierarchy of authority. In addition to tearing
down the authority of midwives and the population’s trust in them, these and
similar images, “also work to convince physicians that midwives pose no threat
to the advancement of obstetric medicine (Keith, Reynolds, Brennan 2013).” War
no longer involved Allies and Nazi soldiers, but had moved to the battle ground
of wombs.

While pushing a heavy campaign to change public opinion
on care providers, the scientific approach leftover from the wars became the
primary obstetrical behavior towards birth. Women were viewed as obstacles at
best, tied to their hospital beds and blinded with head wraps for days,
suffering on the Nazi invented Twilight drug. Medical interventions were used before
establishing safety and effect on the mother and baby, resulting in several
historical embarrassments. For example, obstetricians began using x-ray
technology on pregnant women to view inside the womb,
unaware of the long-term detriments of this intervention. A drug called
Thalidomide, derived from a chemical used for war crimes during the Holocaust,
is heralded as the worst drug scandal in our history. It was heavily promoted
by Nazi doctor Heinrich Muckter and another Nazi, Otto Ambros, who was convicted
for war crimes. Heinrich was given large monetary bonuses from the drug’s
company, Grunenthal, to promote it as a morning-sickness relief drug despite
knowing its potential for birth defects. Grunenthal patented the drug in 1954
as a sedative, claiming it was safe for pregnant women. Thousands of
stillbirths and severely deformed babies resulted. The scandal sounds old, yet
it was only in 2012 that the head of Grunenthal made amends, offering only a
public apology, something Thalidomide survivors found offensively paltry. As
Geoff Adams-Spink says, “Thalidomide has deprived us of the lives we should
have had and many more of any life at all (Adams-Spink 2012).”

The desire to innovate and intervene before considering
the humanity and safety of the mother and child has continued to this day.
Similar to a stealth battalion invading foreign ground for the upper hand,
surgeons today speak of “going in to remove it” from the womb, extracting
babies in a needlessly rough and detached way, without scientific evidence to
prove the benefits of their methods and despite some scientific evidence
pointing to great harm. Cesarean surgery skyrocketed and continues to climb,
posing increased risk of morbidity and mortality to the baby and mother. Inductions, which
frame the birth in a controllable, timed context as opposed to waiting
patiently or following the individual mother, are blamed for causing a 50%
increase in c-sections and for increasing the risk of pre-term birth and birth
injuries. The battleground in the womb has turned mother against child, using
doctors as soldiers and medical instruments as weapons of war.

Caution, patience and
striving for humane standards fell to the side of the road as doctors donned
their armor and entered the war in hospitals. As the American Medical
Association boldly states:

In
many U.S. hospitals today, the management of labor and delivery doesn’t look
very evidence-based. Many well-intentioned obstetricians still employ
technological interventions that are scientifically unsupported or that run
counter to the evidence of what is safest for mother and child. They do so not
because a well-informed pregnant woman has indicated her values contradict…They
do so out of tradition, fear, and the (false) assumption that doing something
is usually better than doing nothing (Sousa, Dreger 2013).

Despite how Americans
feel about previous wars, it’s clear that we as a society still need to
acknowledge and process the experience of back to back war in our country, in
addition to the ongoing wars in our current time. In some kind of twisted way,
the trauma of war imbedded itself in the Baby Boom, carrying on the cycles of
violence not out in a battlefield, but inside what should be the most peaceful
and private area of our species.

We must somehow address the overbearing themes of war and
violence that took hold of the obstetrical industry before it is too late.
Other developed countries have steadfastly improved their childbirth mortality and
morbidity rates annually, while the U.S. stands alone in continuing to drop
down the list. We are dead last for infants and mothers compared to our western
counterparts. The CIA ranks us at 136 out of 184 counted countries, meaning 135
other countries have better outcomes, horrifying, seeing as our country is in first place for amount of money spent on healthcare in the world. For the sake of our children and our
country, it’s time for us to end the war.